Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former leader, killed in Libya

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the longtime former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed in Libya.

Ahmed Khalifa, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent in the North African country, said on Tuesday that Gaddafi is believed to have been shot and killed in the western Libyan city of Zintan, where he was based for the past decade.

The 53-year-old’s killing was confirmed by his political adviser, Abdullah Othman, but the exact circumstances of his death remain unclear.

Khaled al-Mishri, the former head of the Tripoli-based High State Council, an internationally recognised government body, called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into the killing in a social media post on Tuesday.

Gaddafi never had an official position in Libya, but was considered to be his father’s number two from 2000 until 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan opposition forces that ended his decades-long rule.

Gaddafi was captured and imprisoned in Zintan in 2011 after attempting to flee the North African country following the opposition’s takeover of Tripoli.

He was released in 2017 as part of a general pardon.

Prominent role

A Western-educated and well-spoken man, Gaddafi presented a progressive face to the oppressive Libyan regime run by his father – and he played a leading role in a drive to repair Libya’s relations with the West, beginning in the early 2000s.

He received a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2008, with his dissertation looking into the role of civil society in reforming global governance.

Gaddafi remained prominent throughout the violence that gripped the country in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency at the time of the popular uprising in Libya in 2011, he said: “We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya.”

He warned that rivers of blood would flow and the government would fight to the last man and woman and bullet.

“All of Libya will be destroyed. We will need 40 years to reach an agreement on how to run the country, because today, everyone will want to be president, or emir, and everybody will want to run the country,” he said.

Gaddafi faced numerous allegations of torture and extreme violence against opponents of his father’s rule, and by February 2011, he was on a United Nations sanctions list and was banned from travelling.

He was also wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity committed in Libya in 2011.

Following long negotiations with the ICC, Libyan officials were granted authority to try Gaddafi for alleged war crimes. In 2015, a Tripoli court sentenced him to death in absentia.

After his release from detention in 2017, he spent years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination.

From 2016, he was allowed to contact people inside and outside Libya, said Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan analyst with contacts in Gaddafi’s inner circle.